The Slavery QuaneL By a Poor Peacemaker. (Robert Hardwicke.) —This
pamphlet commences with a most comical perversion of history. Negro slavery is compared with the Roman and Norman invasions of England, and the English invasion of India, and it is gravely argued that because Englishmen and Indians have been benefited by the rule of a more cultivated race, therefore negroes will be benefited by being reduced to the condition of brutes. So the slave trade is described as " a conveying of the wild sons of Africa across the ocean, to learn the English language and civilization, just as children are sent to school or put apprentice." After this we think we need not follow the author further. It is enough to say that his work is dedicated to " Thomas Carlyle." The fundamental fallacy, however, is that slavery educates negroes "in the virtue of industry." And yet the advocates of slavery in the same breath tell us that negroes will only work on compulsion. If so, the only industry they practise is not a virtue, for virtue is a voluntary habit ; and what is the good of an education which never can or will be completed. As a matter of fact, the negroes in our West India Colonies have made considerable progress, as all impartial witnesses testify, since emancipation, though there is room for any quantity more; but they never made any so long as they were slaves.
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